The thing Clint Wallace liked best about the street he lived on was that he was the only one who lived on it. The out of the way cul-de-sac had six modest homes, five of which were empty. Clint had lived in the sixth home since he first moved to Torch Lake almost two years ago, when it literally had been all he could afford. Now, he could have bought a mansion, but he stayed on this humble street because no one else seemed interested in living here.

That was all about to change. A peek out the front window of his house told Clint that the loud screech of tires he’d just heard came from a moving van. Clint stepped outside to get a better look. A midsize truck with the words “Magical Moving” emblazoned on the side had just turned onto his street.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Clint said aloud to the small potted plant that adorned his front porch. The plant, as usual, made no reply. But Clint kept talking to it anyway.

“Today of all days! I should have known. I thought everything that could possibly go wrong already had.”

Despite the rain, the small moving van crept its way up the cul-de-sac. Clint couldn’t see the driver in the darkness, but whoever was behind the wheel didn’t seem to know exactly where he or she was going. For a moment, Clint hoped that this was all a mistake. Perhaps the driver had taken a wrong turn, although you’d have to accidentally take quite a few wrong turns to end up on this street. It was the only set of houses for at least a mile. The city of Torch Lake was funny like that. Everything here was so new, and had been built out unevenly. There were pockets of really dense housing, and then places like Clint’s street, where a crop of homes popped up seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Clint cursed under his breath when the moving van pulled into the house right next door to his and then killed its engine. Then he whirled around and went back inside, letting the door slam shut behind him. He was not in the mood to meet his new neighbor right now. He wasn’t sure he’d ever be in the mood to meet the person who had so rudely ended his solitude, but tonight of all nights he was not going be going over with a welcome basket of cookies.

The coffee table in his living room was covered with papers, a few of which had coffee cup rings on them by now. Clint had been here since about three o’clock this afternoon, trying to find some clue as to how the Dark Warriors kept managing to outsmart his team at every turn. Clint worked as a specialist at the Dragon Utilization Department in Torch Lake, and he had been appointed to a special task force that was supposed to convince dragon shifters to move to Torch Lake and make it their new home.

Theoretically, his job should have been easy. Torch Lake was quickly becoming the most talked about city in the shifter-wizard world. Founded just after the end of the Great Dark War, the city aimed to be a stronghold of wizards and shifters who refused to allow evil any foothold. For a while, the town had been relatively quiet, but now, as word got out that the High Council here did not tolerate evil and fiercely protected its citizens, wizards and shifters were moving to Torch Lake in droves.

But despite the public’s confidence, Clint knew that the safety of Torch Lake was far from guaranteed. The Dark Warriors, an underground dark magic group, had been driven away from the city, but they had not forgotten it. They were waiting, biding their time until they were strong enough to attack.

Which was why Torch Lake desperately needed more dragons. Any city these days was only as strong as its dragons. Dragon shifters were tough, and were the hardest shifters to corrupt with evil. They made the best guardians for a city, but they were in short supply after the Dark War. Most of them were hiding in the human world, determined to avoid the chaos of the shifter world.

Clint understood. He himself had moved to a human town after the war, but a Dragon Recovery Specialist had convinced him that Torch Lake was the place to be. Now, Clint couldn’t imagine life anywhere else. Here, he was not a freak trying to hide his inner dragon. He was a respected member of the community.

Well, he’d thought he was respected. After today’s council meeting, he wasn’t so sure. The High Council had chewed him out in front of everyone, blaming him for the fact that every dragon who was found had suddenly disappeared after Clint’s agents were sent to talk to them.

Clint himself was baffled. He was convinced that some sort of dark magic was being used against his team, but he had no proof. And, with his limited knowledge of the magical world, he wasn’t even sure where to start looking. He’d asked a few of the wizards at the Dragon Recovery Bureau to look at his notes on the situation, but they were all busy and had merely promised to get back to him as soon as they could. Which meant never, as far as Clint was concerned.

With a sigh, he sat down on the floor beside the coffee table, leaning his broad back against the couch. He stared at the papers without really seeing them. His eyes glanced over newspaper clippings from the Torch Lake Times—articles questioning whether the town was doing enough to attract dragons. Then he scanned the piles of classified papers that held official records on which dragons Torch Lake had tried and failed to convince to move to Torch Lake. Each dragon had seemed so promising. But each time one of Clint’s agents tried to visit a dragon, the dragon disappeared before the agent had a chance to talk to the dragon.

The High Council blamed Clint, since he was the one working with the Dragon Recovery Bureau to track down the dragons. Today when Clint told the High Council that he believed dark magic was to blame, they had laughed him out of the council room and told him that he couldn’t blame every job failure he had on dark magic.

Clint put his head in his hands, trying to stave off the headache that was slowly beginning. Perhaps if he was silent and still for a few moments, the throbbing in his temples would subside.

But no sooner had he closed his eyes than a loud bang startled them open. A sharp wave of pain from the offending sound shot through his forehead, and he groaned. Was his new neighbor actually going to try to unload that moving van tonight? It was dark, and pouring rain!

Clint stood and went to peek out the front window again. The new neighbor, who was definitely a woman, had let down the ramp on the back of the moving van. That must have been the loud bang he’d heard. Now, she was carrying an oversized box down the slippery ramp, which already had two small rivers of water running down its edges. The woman wore a bright yellow rain poncho, which, judging from the amount it flapped about in the wind, was not doing much to actually protect her from the downpour.

Clint cursed again, then went to grab his own rain jacket. As unhappy as he was about someone moving in next door, he wasn’t going to stand here and watch a woman struggle to move in on her own in the rain. His conscience wouldn’t let him rest unless he went to help her.

“Time to meet the new neighbor,” he grumbled to himself as he stormed out the front door and into the monsoon.